1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a system and method for distributing, replicating and managing files across multiple computer systems. More particularly this invention relates to the synchronization of a system of media files and associated metadata across a network of file sharing servers for generating a large volume and variety of unique files to share over Peer-to-Peer or similar networks to accomplish various preventative and/or promotional applications related to the content of the media files.
2. Description of Related Art
Online access to digital media (including audio, images, video, text based files, computer programs, and other software content) has become commonplace in recent years, not only through legitimate online purchasing and downloading methods, but also largely through the proliferated use of Internet based file sharing/swapping and or trading communities, collectively known and referred to as “Peer to Peer” (P2P) applications or networks. While perhaps not inherently illegal, these P2P networks are most often used by digital media consumers to engage in mass sharing and downloading of copyrighted files across the Internet. As a result, many companies which develop such digital content have reported lost sales, and such P2P trading continues to pose a threat to the bottom line of content providers. The music industry in particular has quoted dwindling sales of CD's in the past several years, which according to their data, is due in large part to such illegitimate online file trading. Several methods to thwart illegal online trading have been adopted and proposed, none of which has yet proven to be a viable answer to the growing P2P piracy problem.
For instance, many forms of encryption and digital rights management have been implemented in audio content files themselves to thwart or deter online piracy. Even given the best file encryption methods however (which are often broken by determined media pirates), once a song or audio file has been recorded onto a computer via any means (ie. cracking the file encryption, or simply recording hi-fidelity audio into a computer via commercially available hardware and software packages) the file(s) may be easily shared on the Internet via any number of currently available P2P networks.
Concerning the P2P networks themselves, many have or could potentially be shut down via legal avenues, however due to the intense popularity of such applications, and the easy access to source code for P2P applications, more decentralized and unregulated P2P networks continue to crop up and to be used largely for illegitimate downloading purposes, thus creating a problem which may not feasibly be solved solely through application of the legal system. Even broad legislation addressing such piracy problems would suffer from the same inabilities to effectively and judiciously reign in every user and proliferator of P2P applications. Thus, the decentralization and proliferation of online file sharing networks has created an environment ripe for both piracy, and promotion of digital content.
In recent years, content industries have taken on somewhat of a “fight fire with fire” approach, and begun attempting to seed some P2P networks with lower quality (often for advertisement purposes), or decoy media files (containing bogus media content). While sometimes effective against causal P2P users, more sophisticated P2P users are able to thwart such methods by identifying bogus content (using data hash values or other data identifying characteristics) and weeding such content out of downloads. Additionally, because content can be better protected (and conversely, promoted) when a file is distributed across multiple servers under a multitude of different names, the task of generating, distributing, replicating, renaming, and managing a voluminous quantity of decoy (or promotional) files is prohibitively burdensome using currently available systems and methods.
For instance, currently, if a content owner desires to protect content online using a decoy distribution method, he must manually replicate, rename (including modification of the file metadata, and optionally manipulation of the file data to change data hash values), and distribute the decoy files to one or more file sharing servers, and then manually update and manage such files on each server. Even given these tasks, the protection gained using this method is only as good as the number of unique files (having different names, metadata, and data hash values) the content owner is willing to generate for a given item of media content, as many instances of the same file on a P2P network can easily be identified and avoided by P2P users. Thus, given a large quantity of desired content files to be protected, the content owner must manually generate and distribute thousands, or even millions of unique decoy files to provide adequate protection against piracy. Similarly, content owners desiring to promote the proliferation of their content using P2P networks experience similar difficulties in generating a large quantity of unique files to distribute which would enable the quick and effective distribution, and thus promotion, of their content.
As such, currently existing technologies and methods have not adequately addressed the problems involved in distributing, replicating, and managing digital files for use in preventative and promotional applications in P2P or similar file sharing networks, thus minimizing or maximizing, respectively, the proliferation of given media content (such as music files) on the network(s). There is therefore a need for a computer network file synchronization system and method for distributing, replicating, and managing many generated decoy or promotional files across multiple networked computer systems to enable improved preventative and promotional applications in online file sharing networks, which overcomes the shortcomings in the prior art.